


Remake a Thing

by Barkour



Series: White Wolf and Panther [1]
Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Prosthetics Ethics, Recovery, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 09:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14017491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Bucky needs an arm. Shuri could provide.





	Remake a Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the misty grey zone between Black Panther and Infinity War.
> 
> In before age wank: I read Shuri as a young adult. I'm not interested in writing Shuri/Bucky where she's a teen so, she isn't one here. 
> 
> If you personally read her as a teenager and if this fic (which does indeed suggest Shuri/Bucky) upsets you, then please do not continue to read.

Barnes did not know how to deal with her. She could see it all over his hairy, pasty, glowering face. Shuri bent this to her advantage. She already had him sitting on a too-low chair in her lab. At that height, she very nearly loomed over him by ten, even twelve centimeters.

“And I say it’s too early to undergo a surgery like this.” She dismissed the holographic arm between them.

Barnes squinted at the empty space then eyed her sidelong.

“You look like a warthog,” she added.

“I need the arm.”

“You’re still recovering.”

His jaw set. He looked a mule instead. She was wrong about the pig.

“I need the arm,” he said.

“For what?”

“I need the arm for what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“What you are _supposed_ to be doing,” she said sharply, “is recuperating. Somewhere safe, that is, and not running around with guns. Guns! No, your brain needs to recalibrate.” 

She tapped meaningfully at the holographic Bucky’s head. The hologram’s hair was much neater.

“You don’t understand.” He said it almost softly. It still grated in his mouth, and the look of his eyes when he tipped them up to her was dark.

Shuri tap-tapped the pump heel of her boot. “What I don’t understand is why you’ve decided against my expert medical opinion that now is the time.” 

It was Bucky, in fact, who had rejected the prosthetic arm she offered after he had first defrosted, so to speak. He’d hardly looked at the schematics before harshly saying, “No. I don’t want it,” and Shuri had hated to put away her beautiful plans but she did it out of deference to his health. The arm, to him, was a weapon.

Now here he was not two months later asking for her to pull the plans back out.

“I gave six months! And even that is rushing it.” She did soften then. “The things they put you through… There aren’t easy ways to fix them.”

He was quiet for a long time after that. The rough-callused fingers of his flesh hand flexed and straightened. He’d black hair on his forearms but only freckles on the biceps. 

Shuri busied herself with the simpler distraction of meteorological reports: strange radiation in the skies these days. The sorts of signals that suggested faster than light movement by extraterrestrial entities.

The chair creaked. He leaned toward her. The pinned sleeve at his right side creased with the movement. He said, “Princess.”

She said, “Bucky.”

Barnes grimaced. Finally he said, “Shuri,” and she nodded, satisfied. Primly she struck off the top report for the one below. 

“I want my arm back,” he said, “because there are things that need to be done. That I can do.”

“And why do you have to do them?”

He almost – she was sure of it – he might have smiled. Perhaps a little ruefully he did so. She could see in that moment some trace of the Sergeant Bucky Barnes in the old war reels; and Shuri found this both exhilarating and odd, not kin to the quiet, solemn man she had come to like.

“I saw the news.”

“Oh?”

“The outreach you’re doing,” he said. “That, uh. The brainy stuff.”

“Oh, the brainy stuff,” Shuri muttered. “It’s this brainy stuff that kept you alive.”

“And, um, that Killmonger guy. You faced him. Right?”

He’d very neatly cut: distracted her then pulled the cord tightly through her. Shuri stared at the report without seeing it. She inhaled through her nose the way Ayo had taught her, “to control your temper.” 

(“I don’t have a temper!” she’d protested, and Ayo had only looked at her with that lioness’ gimlet glare, and Shuri had breathed in through her nose.)

“I did that because I had to,” said Shuri, “for Wakanda.”

Bucky looked at her. He said, “I need my arm,” and she heard what he was saying to her. “I don't need a weapon,” he was saying, for it was the weapon he had feared, or rather: “I need my arm, that is a tool, and not the weapon forced on me.” She thought this was what he meant. He could be very hard to read sometimes when he was not scowling.

“If I do this,” she said. “I said, if! Don’t put your scowl away! _If_ I do this then you can’t be Winter Soldier again. Do you understand that?”

He nodded, very gravely. She could not comprehend how he could be so grave; but then, she supposed if she had been psychologically broken and suborned in every way by a hostile world power, she too would lose some of her much famed sense of humor.

“Just Bucky,” he said.

Shuri scoffed at this. “Where’s the dramatics in that? No,” she said, pretending to think, “maybe… Yes. You’ll be the White Wolf.”

His brow knitted. A question furrowed his mouth.

“Because you’re as mangy as a starving wolf and,” she added, pitching her voice to a confidential whisper, “you’re very white.”

The strangled glimpse of a smile that netted fit him much better than the sly and dashing thing of before. It made her heart do a strange thing in her chest. She ignored this. She’d work to do, and Bucky leaned in rather closer when Shuri started showing him the different plans.


End file.
